Prison Courtyard, by Vincent van Gogh, 1890. The Pushkin Museum of Fine Art, Moscow, Russia.

Prison Courtyard, by Vincent van Gogh, 1890. The Pushkin Museum of Fine Art, Moscow, Russia.

Crimes & Punishments

Volume II, Number 2 | spring 2009

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Soldiers and police establishing line at door of the Morgan Bank after anti-capitalist Wall Street bombing, September 16, 1920.

Preamble

Crime Scenes

By Lewis H. Lapham

The American fondness for the dressing up of crime in the costumes of romance is an amusement priced at too high a cost.

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Depiction of Dashiell Hammett's character Sam Spade, cover of Black Mask magazine, September 1929.

From the Drawing Room to the Gutter

By Charles Taylor

Crime fiction affords its readers a way to acknowledge the world’s violence without either succumbing to despair or believing it can be made to go away.

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Map

Spider Men

The world’s most-wanted criminals.

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1890 | Auburn

Rigor of Death

The invention of the electric chair. More

c. 1650 | Boston

Withholding Redemption

Sinners in the hands of Nathaniel Hawthorne. More

1865 | Washington, DC

Following Orders

Who jails the jailer?More

Charts & Graphs

Near Misses

Failed political assassinations of the twentieth century.

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Black and white photograph of French novelist, essayist, and playwright Albert Camus.

American literary critic and novelist Elizabeth Hardwick.

English critic and author G. K. Chesterton.

Saint Augustine (detail), by Philippe de Champaigne, c. 1645.

Portrait bust of presumed author of the Iliad and the Odyssey Homer.

Black and white photograph of Mencken looking over his shoulder at the camera

Seamus Heaney, 1970. Photograph by Simon Garbutt.

Woman with short gray hair seated with a book open in her lap

A crowded police court docket is the surest sign that trade is brisk and money plenty.

—Mark Twain, 1872

Black and white photograph of Friedrich Nietzsche with a huge mustache.

American lawyer Clarence Darrow.

Friedrich Nietzsche & Clarence Darrow

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Lapham’sDaily

Roundtable

Lapham’s Quarterly Is on Hiatus

By Lapham’s Quarterly

But the American Agora Foundation is already planning for the future. More

The Colosseum, attributed to Robert Eaton, c. 1855.

DÉjÀ Vu

Monumental Mistakes

2023:

Fitness instructor carves his girlfriend’s name into the Colosseum.

c. 1850:

Thompson of Sunderland makes his mark on Pompey’s pillar.

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Terracotta funerary plaque, Greek, Attic, c. 520 BC.

The World in Time

Robert D. Kaplan

Lewis H. Lapham speaks with the author of The Tragic Mind: Fear, Fate, and the Burden of Power. More

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